Datasheet

Chapter 1: Defining Data Loss

to commit their crimes). So the more data you have, the bigger the secu-

rity risk — and these days all that data requires vast amounts of storage.

Unfortunately, IT is losing control of the storage — and control of the data.

When desktop external storage drives reach terabyte (thousand-gigabyte)

capacity and are as easy to use as a little USB storage device, the walls of

the data center might as well come tumbling down. Data isn’t always stored

in the data center. It wanders away to external drives, USB keys, iPods, and

cell phones. All the data in your phone’s contact list, for example, is personal

identifiable information — sometimes referred to (irritatingly) as PII. As such

it should be protected; in fact, there are laws about protecting information,

and most people are either unaware of them or just ignore them.

The messaging boom throws

data everywhere

Data is everywhere, e-mail has become the language of business, okay, so

we still use the phone, but it’s e-mail that transfers data. E-mail, in fact, has

become the business record — essential documentation for compliance with

the laws that affect your industry. E-mail, which is so easy to send to the

wrong person — a data leak right there! Of course, e-mail is now seen as too

slow. So people are supplementing it with instant messaging and texting on

mobile phones. We’re all going digital in our contact with other people —

compulsively sending data off to who-knows-where, usually unaware of unin-

tended side effects like these:

✓ The number of text messages sent daily is bigger than the population of

the planet. (Even if your teenager seems to be sending half of those, it’s

still a huge amount of stuff floating around in the ether.)

✓ The average distance you have to be from a colleague before you resort

to e-mail is (apparently) a mere 6 feet. (More usage means more data

wandering around until someone grabs it.)

✓ One out of eight couples who married in 2006 in the U.S. met online.

(Imagine the sheer amount of personal data the sweethearts must have

exchanged without bothering to encrypt it.)

✓ MySpace has over 300 million registered users; if it were a country, it

would be the fourth largest in the world, between Indonesia and the

U.S. The average MySpace page gets over 30 visits per day. (Are some of

those visitors sneakily checking social-networking sites for unauthorized

data? You bet they are.)

✓ In 2007, the U.K. saw 160,000 cases at hospital A&E (Accident and

Emergency) rooms that were related to people not looking where they

were going while texting. That’s the equivalent of 160,000 people walking

carelessly into lampposts while staring at their phones.

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